Scrimshaw Porn doesn't want you to dance, he wants you to reckon on new single 'Epilogue'

The Boston artist behind Scrimshaw Porn has never made music quite like this. Then again, the times haven't quite been like this either.

Nick Helgesen built his reputation on restraint. His project Scrimshaw Porn - a vehicle for everything that feels too personal, too atmospheric, too layered for a conventional band - has always found its emotional centre at the piano: intimate, deliberate, haunted. Tracks like Eleonore and Bore are the kind of songs you encounter alone, usually late, usually in the dark.

Epilogue is not that kind of song.

Released on March 26th, Helgesen's latest single arrives hot, groove-laden, and furious - a full-body departure that even its creator didn't see coming. "Unlike most of my tracks, it was not rooted in piano but more based on drive and anger," Helgesen says. "I was a bit surprised at how dancey it came out."

Epilogue is a direct and unsparing indictment of what Helgesen calls "the hypocrisy of the bullshit and very obvious cover-up being propagated by the current administration" in relation to the Jeffrey Epstein case. It doesn't hedge. It doesn't abstract. It speaks directly to Epstein's victims with a message that justice - however delayed, however obstructed - will come. That the record pulses with enough energy to move a dance floor only intensifies the contradiction it lives in: righteous fury, wrapped in rhythm.

The production is a collaborative achievement. Multi-instrumentalist Matt Antunes - whose contributions across drums, bass, and guitar Helgesen describes as "super funky" and decisive - anchors the track with the kind of physical presence that makes it feel less like a statement and more like a confrontation. Longtime co-producer Matt Ricci returns to shape a layered palette spanning electric guitar, synths, samplers, keyboards, and vocals. The result lands somewhere between the industrial tension of Nine Inch Nails, the wry cool of Mac DeMarco, the synth urgency of Nation of Language, and the cerebral groove of Daft Punk - but lands, ultimately, as something distinctly its own.

For those only recently paying attention, the timing feels pointed. Epilogue follows Olivia, which held the number one spot on the Worldwide Top 40 at Kbradio.online for three consecutive weeks at the end of 2025. Before that: We Don't Talk, Edgar Allan, the September Surf EP, and the radio hit Good Girl - a body of work that has earned Helgesen over 26,000 unique Spotify listeners and a growing international audience.

But to understand why Epilogue feels so charged, it helps to understand where Helgesen started. He first sat at his family's Steinway at the age of four - the same piano his father still plays today, entirely by ear. He grew up steeped in Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis, Carole King and James Taylor, The Cure and The Smiths. Later came Boston bands Brave New World and The Arm, who shared stages with Eric Burdon and the Smithereens and placed their debut album in the top 25 most-requested on 127 U.S. radio stations. Scrimshaw Porn became the vessel for everything that didn't fit anywhere else: the history, the personal grief, the refusal to be neat.

Epilogue is Scrimshaw Porn at its most unguarded - and its most urgent. There is no atmospheric restraint here, no shelter in the piano's resonance. Only the groove, the anger, and the unflinching insistence that some things cannot be quietly buried.

Dance to it if you need to. But listen to what it's saying.